Crowdsourcing Organizational Change: A Collaborative Approach to Leading Change

Posted on May 6, 2010 by itorganization2017

In the first post in this series, I provided some brief context for ‘change leadership’ (a term I find more apt than ‘change management.’)  I also introduced a caveat about linear, sequential, ‘programmatic’ change methodologies and briefly discussed the emergence over the last 15 years or so, of a more organic and emergent view of organizational change.

I observed that these emergent models are less alternatives to the more mechanistic models than they are refinements that help us interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change can be planned and led, but the plans must be continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors. And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change – i.e., you are not starting from scratch – you often recognize a good change that is happening (perhaps in one part of a company) and want to accelerate and broaden that change.

From “Push” Change Leadership…

Traditional organizational change methods are generally based on a ‘push’ model of change – we (company leadership) want you (employees) to work differently (e.g., reengineered processes, new incentive/reward systems, new tools/technologies, new organization structures, mergers/de-mergers, and so on).  For example, John Kotter’s 8-Step Change Process suggests we should:

  1. Establish a sense of urgency
  2. Create a guiding coalition
  3. Develop a vision and strategy
  4. Communicate the change vision
  5. Empower broad based action
  6. Generate short term wins
  7. Consolidate gains and produce more change
  8. Anchor change in the new culture

There is something both ‘Taylorist’ (the leaders are smart and know what to do, the workers are dumb and must be told what to do) and inherently manipulative about this approach.  I believe that the types of changes many companies are attempting to engage in today require that both ‘hearts and minds’ must be engaged in the change.  It’s not enough for them to simply to follow a new process – they must truly understand and wholeheartedly embrace the values and ideals behind the process.  They must want to follow the new process (or whatever the change being implemented is), not do so just because they’ve been told to.  Ensuring an exceptional customer experience, for example, does not simply happen because your customer-facing employees follow new procedures.

As such, change that requires “hearts and minds”, while it might be accomplished through a ‘push’ model of change leadership, is far more likely to take hold with more of a ‘pull’ approach.  In fact, I’d argue that most of the changes around Enterprise 2.0 (corporate and organizational adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking, and so on) very much lend themselves to a ‘pull’ approach, or at least to more of a balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ change models.

… to “Pull” Change Leadership

So, adopting Enterprise 2.0 really requires more of a ‘pull’ approach to organizational change management.  And the good (great!) news is that Web 2.0 lends itself to enabling this kind of change.  Of course, there’s a ‘catch 22′ here – if people aren’t using Web 2.0 (or even worse in some companies – are not allowed to use these tools!), then how can they be used to facilitate change?

We will dig deeper into this in a subsequent post, where I will take a fictitious (but realistic) change situation and see how Web 2.0 ‘pull’ can be leveraged as a great counterbalance to traditional ‘push’ methods of change.

Image courtesy of Transforming Visions

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: IT Maturity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Influcencing Change In Your IT Operating Model

Posted on April 28, 2010 by itorganization2017

My last post, “Business-IT alignment – The Relationship Dimension” drew some interesting and even passionate commentary.  In particular, one frustrated commenter (someone in a Relationship Management role) pleaded, “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”

I’ve posted numerous times on aspects of Organizational Change Management (see link for examples) but perhaps it’s time to revisit this perennial puzzle.

Change Management – The Quintessential Misnomer!

Actually, I think that the term “Organizational Change Management” is a terrible misnomer – change can’t be “managed” in the ways that people and projects can.  It can be “inspired”, “led”, “facilitated”, or it can “subverted” and “rejected,” but it can’t be managed.  Also, for IT folk, the term is too close to “change management” – that technical stuff associated with ensuring that changes to a system are implemented in a controlled manner.

I prefer the term “Change Leadership” – with the important caveat that we are all leaders when it comes to changes we’d like to see.  If it’s a change we don’t know is needed, or we would like to see it not happen, then it is down to others to “lead us into the light” and get us on board with the change.  Either way, it’s a leadership issue.  That’s why I loved my most recent commenter’s plea – “What should I do? How can I influence to bring the necessary changes?”  This is one relationship manager who recognizes his role in leading change!  (And who is not afraid to ask for help in filling that role!)

So Much Known, So Little Applied!

The big irony for me is that so much is known about and written about Organizational Change, and that we all have many years of first-hand experience trying to change our own behaviors or those of friends or family members, and yet most organizations are so completely inept at it!  There are books on change dating back to the early 1940′s (see, for example Kurt Lewin’s work), and a current search on Amazon.com yields 11,860 titles!  And, according to Google, there are currently 191,000 Blogs on the topic!  Clearly, the domain is fraught with subtleties and complexities.

Why Are IT Professionals So Inept at Organizational Change?

OK, so that’s a deliberately inflammatory question and a massively sweeping generalization – but from my personal experience in a 40-year IT career, it’s generally true.  I think it has to do with the characteristics of the IT profession that draw people to it – tangible, finite, project oriented.  IT professionals take highly ambiguous situations and ultimately reduce them to zeros and ones!  I’m not sure which is ‘chicken’ and which is ‘egg’ (i.e., do people good at driving out ambiguity gravitate to IT, or is it a learned behavior by IT professionals?) but I find that IT folk don’t like ambiguity.  And yet leading change means living with ambiguity.  IT professionals like plans, with beginnings, middles and ends – with defined deliverables and clear milestones.  Organizational change has none of these characteristics.  It is about people, not systems or bits and bytes.  It is about politics and influence, not routines and processes.

So, with such a plethora of research and written wisdom, what can I hope add to this body of work?  My goal (in a short series of posts) is to highlight the most useful Organization Change Leadership Model I have come across, and try to simplify and illustrate it with real examples from the world of IT management.  I’ll also point you to the excellent Change Management Blog.

Kotter’s Change Model – And It’s Potential Flaws

Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter has researched and written extensively on organizational change and has articulated an 8-Step Change Model.   (See his excellent HBR article “Why Transformation Efforts Fail.”  Also, the invaluable MindTools web site has this excellent summary of the Kotter Change Model.)

First, an important caveat.  To my point about the misnomer of “Change Management”, the Kotter model  implies linearity and assumes predictability and manageability of the change processes.  I don’t believe it should be interpreted or used this way.  In the immortal wisdom of Jerry Weinberg, “The project actually started long before it was officially declared ‘a project’.”  So has the organizational change typically ‘started’ before anyone gets too involved in planning how to drive it or, at least, to steer it!

In the last 15 years or so, a more organic and emergent view of organizational change has surfaced, leveraging chaos and complexity theory.  See, for example, Wanda J. Orlikowski and J. Debra Hofman’s “An Improvisational Model of Change Management: The Case of Groupware Technologies.”

I don’t see these emergent models as alternatives to the more mechanistic models, but as refinements that help to interpret and apply them – i.e, organizational change should be planned, but the plans continuously revised in the light of emergent behaviors.  And sometimes the emergent behaviors actually precede the recognition of the need for organizational change.  For example, many IT organizations today are trying (and failing!) to leverage social networking (typically around Microsoft‘s SharePoint).  At the same time, many members of the IT organization are participating in a number of social networks – both within their company and with external communities (e.g., FaceBook, LinkedIn, Plaxo).  So, while IT leaders are trying to “manage” a social network initiative (i.e., planned, formally managed), the reality is that social networking is already happening, but in an unplanned and emergent way.  If the planned efforts could understand and leverage the emergent activities, there is a better chance that social networking could be “steered” towards improved outcomes for the IT community and for the company.

My next post will pick up on the Kotter Change Model and begin to illustrate it with real world war stories and examples.

Image Courtesy of Management Excellence

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: Change Management, Useful Tools | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Business-IT Alignment – The Relationship Dimension

Posted on April 26, 2010 by itorganization2017

Much has been written about “Business-IT Alignment” over the years.  Alignment can refer to Strategy – the degree to which IT strategy and business strategy are aligned.  (This, of course, is both ‘old news’ and yet often not the case in practice.  And there’s one school of thought that says there’s no such thing as IT strategy – it’s only business strategy with IT implications.)

Alignment can also refer to Structure – IT capabilities are structured to align with business structures and needs.  But there’s a crucial ‘third leg’ to the business-IT alignment stool, and that is the alignment of relationships that sit between business units and IT capabilities.

The Crucial Relationship Manager Role

Many IT organizations have created a role that bridges the business and IT.  Rarely actually called “Relationship Managers”, this role represents IT to the business and the business to IT. I’ve posted on this role before – see, for example The IT Relationship Manager’s Role in Expanding Business-IT Capability,  and From Supply-Constrained to Value-Constrained IT Business Model, and IT Maturity and the Role of the Relationship Management.  Sometimes called an IT Account Manager, or Business-IT Director, or some-such, the role is primarily responsible for ‘demand shaping‘ – stimulating an appetite for high value demand, and suppressing appetites for low value demand.  Sometimes, people in this Relationship Manager Role are effectively mini-CIO’s or Business Unit CIO’s – leveraging shared IT infrastructure (and often leveraging common applications and enterprise systems) but taking care of business unit-specific IT needs.

Relationship Alignment

There are at least three dimensions along which Relationship Managers can align with their business partners.  The first two dimensions are pretty obvious and generally handled well, but the third dimension is trickier and often not well addressed.  The dimensions are:

  1. Domain Expertise – the Relationship Manager (or whatever title this role operates under) needs to really understand the business domain for which they are responsible.  Be it marketing, supply chain, human resources, and so on, they need to have deep domain knowledge in order to bring real value to their business partners and have the credibility to have impact.
  2. Geography – as the real estate cliché goes, ‘location, location, location!’ so goes Relationship Management.  At its best, the Relationship Manager should be co-located with the senior managers of the business unit with which they are aligned.  At the very least, they need easy access.  The occasional ‘fly in’ to meet with their business partners typically doesn’t do it in terms of creating a productive business-IT partnership.
  3. Maturity – this is the tricky dimension, and one that is typically not well addressed.  Skilled Relationship Managers are a rare resource.  You want your most effective and creative Relationship Managers aligned with those business units and executives with the highest demand maturity – i.e., with the best  capacity to recognize and leverage high value IT-enabled opportunities.  Innovative, ‘change agent’ types of Relationship Managers will quickly become frustrated facing off against executives who are technologically in the dark ages, or who cherish the status quo.  Similarly, progressive, innovative business leaders will become quickly frustrated working with a Relationship Manager who lacks drive, a sense of urgency, the creativity to generate valuable ideas about IT possibilities, and the wherewithal to bring them to fruition.

How Healthy Are Your Business-IT Relationships?

Clearly, the CIO is in many ways the ‘über-Relationship Manager’, setting the tone for demand shaping and the strategic context for IT, and typically ‘owning’ the business-IT relationships with the most senior executive team.  But no CIO has the bandwidth or domain expertise to handle all the relationships at all the management levels needed to surface and steer the best opportunities to create business value from IT.  So, how healthy and productive are your key relationships between business and IT? Do you even know what would be considered ‘key relationships’?  How would you know the degree to which they are fully delivering value against their potential?

Let me know your thoughts and experiences around Relationship Management effectiveness.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: Demand Maturity, IT Management, IT Maturity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

IT Leadership – Caught between Two Realities?

Posted on April 21, 2010 by itorganization2017

It’s always been tough being an IT leader.  The “Career Is Over” distortion of the CIO acronym is humorous because of the real world challenges associated with the CIO job.  I think that today is an especially challenging time for IT leaders.  I say that because these jobs are typically caught somewhere between two very different realities – realities we might refer to as “1.0″ and “2.0″.

IT Reality 1.0

Reality 1.0 holds that IT must be managed.  It is difficult and complex – fraught with crucial technical details.  Mastering these details requires teams of technical experts, following rigorous processes and procedures.  Issues that mere mortals don’t often think about – things such as back up and recovery, security and privacy, regulatory compliance, business continuity – must be planned for and managed by IT specialists who have been properly trained and certified in these disciplines.

Reality 1.0 holds that IT should be owned, and certainly, must be controlled internally.  It holds that business users must be protected – both from themselves and from the raft of vendors and consultants, all trying to sell them stuff that could cost them money (at the very least) and might even get them in trouble.

Reality 1.0 holds that qualified IT resources are scarce and costly.  They take time to develop and cannot be ramped up or down quickly.  Therefore, long term planning and concerns about scaling are constantly on the IT professional’s mind.

Reality 1.0 is obsessed with risk avoidance.  Constantly aware of many of the horror stories that are told around the IT campfires (and sometimes involved in either perpetrating or recovering from such horrors), IT leaders work to prevent the many risks associated with IT.

Given resource and risk issues with IT, Reality 1.0 deploys sophisticated tools and governance processes to filter the many opportunities for IT-enablement and weed out all but the key initiatives that justify the the investment and risks.

Reality 1.0 perceives the world of IT as relatively closed and proprietary.  Therefore, it is obsessed with IT architectures and standards – with figuring out how to weave together point solutions into capabilities that meet enterprise needs.

Reality 1.0 is about large projects and solutions – multi-month, sometimes multi-year initiatives designed to last for years.

Reality 1.0 separates the world into ‘development’ and ‘production.’  The move from one to the other is like the move through an airlock – from a dangerous and polluted free-for-all into the safe, secure and sterile data center.

IT Reality 2.0

Reality 2.0, by contrast, holds that IT is simple, ubiquitous and inherently safe.  Almost anyone can be creative and productive with IT – all they need is an Internet connection and a device equipped with a web browser.  If the user knows nothing, they can simply leverage what is already on the web – and learn as they do so.  If they know a little, and are adventurous, they can do much more than passively leverage what is already there – they can “mash up” new capabilities from existing ones to solve new problems.  They can learn as they go, become even more adventurous and creative – perhaps even commercialize what they have created.  Over time they will become even more skilled – creating more sophisticated solutions – or leveraging ‘crowdsourcing‘ to engage others to help them create the solutions they need.

Reality 2.0 does not care about IT ownership or control – they care about results.

Reality 2.0 sees the world as a sea of opportunities and solutions to be tried and exploited.

Reality 2.0 sees IT resources as ubiquitous – found with a click of the mouse, engaged with a few more clicks, and paid only when they’ve delivered.  Resources are paid for as they are needed – no long term commitments or overhead payments to worry about or justify.

Reality 2.0 is about risk management – moving incrementally and organically, managing risks as they are recognized.

Reality 2.0 has no time for bureaucratic processes such as governance committees and cost justification rigmaroles.  It sees any opportunity as worthy of a quick experiment to see if its real – it believes that in the time it takes to create a business case or wait for the next governance committee meeting, the idea can be tested and validated or eliminated – let the proof of the pudding be in the eating, so to speak, not in the political machinations of investment review bodies.

Reality 2.0 perceives the world of IT as essentially open.  Things in its world naturally fit together.  Therefore, things can be built in small incremental steps – evolving in the light of experience and changing needs.  Things can also be built as discrete point solutions – and yet still can be fitted together if need be.

Reality 2.0 is about small projects and solutions – created in days or weeks and designed for just as long as they are effective.

Reality 2.0 sees development and production as living side-by-side in some virtual place in the sky – while I’m working on its creation, it’s in development.  Once it’s working, I declare it ‘production’ and it is so.

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times…

If IT Reality 1.0 accurately reflected today’s world – as it did for most of the last 50 years or so – life would be ok for IT leaders.  Both they and their business consumers would understand their respective roles and would work together for the mutual good.  If Reality 2.0 accurately reflected the world – as it might do in the next 50 years or so, life would ok for IT leaders.  While their roles and those of their business consumers would be very different from those typical today, again they’d be on common ground.

The really big challenge today is that the reality today is neither 1.0 or 2.0 – it is in transition.  And in the immortal words of William Gibson, “The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”  This ‘uneven distribution’ of IT Realities 1.0 and 2.0 is going to represent both a curse and an opportunity to IT leaders.  For the progressives, it’s a wonderful opportunity to shift IT into overdrive.  For the laggards, I fear that it’s going to make their lives more and more miserable!

Do you live in this dichotomy?  How quickly is reality 1.0 being replaced by reality 2.0?  Are these realities coexisting?  What are you doing to accelerate or impede the shift?

Image courtesy of Rumple at Flickr

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: Business-IT Governance, IT Management, Next Generation IT, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , | 7 Comments »

Innovation and Web 2.0 – A Compelling Relationship?

Posted on April 6, 2010 by itorganization2017


I had a very interesting and exciting week!  I was a speaker at an nGenera Senior Executive Summit, which drew about 60 top executives from mostly large companies – CEO’s, CIO’s, CFO’s, HR and shared service heads, and even a couple of Lawyers and Platform/Brand managers.  It was an auspicious group – both in terms of participants and presenters/session leaders, which included Jim Collins, Michael Treacy, Don Tapscott, Tammy Erickson and Dartmouth’s Tuck School Professor, Chris Trimble.

I introduced my ideas about leveraging Web 2.0 (broadly defined) to significantly drive up the value of business innovation – specifically by following the principles and processes of Design Thinking.  I’ve been getting to this point in my last series of posts (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.)  In fact, those posts were largely written as I was developing my session materials.

Does ‘Design Thinking’ Have Legs?

Part of my thesis built upon the success of the Design Thinking movement that has gelled over the last 5 years.  I have found the success stories compelling, and the underlying principles resonate with my own experiences and values over the last 30 years in trying to leverage IT for increased innovation.  However, I was troubled by the recognition and acceptability of the term ‘Design Thinking’ – especially in the US.  The text of a 2007 speech by BusinessWeek‘s Bruce Nussbaum given in London tipped me off that there might be a problem here.

Nussbaum’s Banana…

In his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art, Nussbaum noted:

In the US, CEOs and top managers hate the word “design.” Just believe me. No matter what they tell you, they believe that “design” only has something to do with curtains, wallpaper and maybe their suits. These guys, and they’re still mostly guys, prefer the term “innovation” because it has a masculine, military, engineering, tone to it. Think Six Sigma and you want to salute, right? I’ve tried and tried to explain that design goes way beyond aesthetics. It can have process, metrics all the good hard stuff managers love. But no, I can’t budge this bunch. So I have given up. Innovation, design, technology—I just call it all a banana. Peel that banana back and you find great design. Yummy design. . The kind of design that can change business culture and all of our civil society as well.”

One of the first to make the Web 2.0 connection, Nussbaum went on to say:

Innovation is no longer just about new technology per se. It is about new models of organization. Design is no longer just about form anymore but is a method of thinking that can let you to see around corners. And the high tech breakthroughs that do count today are not about speed and performance but about collaboration, conversation and co-creation. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about.”

I tested the waters of my Summit attendees, first by asking how many in the room had some familiarity with the term ‘Design Thinking’?   Three hands shot up, and a couple sort of hovered around shoulder level (presumably meaning, “I’ve heard of it, but please don’t call on me to talk about it!”).  Of the three hands, two were from companies for whom I had Design Thinking case studies about and who were listed in my very first slide (I had not at this point turned on the projector.)  The third hand was from a senior executive at a major Industrial Supply company that I had not expected to be particularly Design Thinking literate.  So, test 1 indicated that the term is not widely known.  Of course, this does not necessarily mean that Design Thinking is not widely practiced – perhaps all 60 companies in the room do in fact excel at Design Thinking, but refer to what they do as some variation of Nussbaum’s ‘banana’?  However, I truly doubt this.  In fact, the many one-on-one conversations that I had with the executives at this summit during the reception and dinner following my presentation supported my sense that explicit efforts to drive up the value of business innovation are relatively few and far between.

Are Design Thinkers Web 2.0 Enabled?

To the larger part of my thesis, there was little evidence at this Summit that any form of Web 2.0 was being explicitly leverage to support Design Thinking (or innovation, or the banana!)  There were a few ‘accidental experiments’ and emergent social networks – both internal and external – but nothing claimed as part of a deliberate, holistic effort to increase innovation through Web 2.0 technologies.  This for me was the big surprise.  The Senior Vice President of Strategy from one of the Design Thinking literate companies told me at the reception, “When you first connected Design Thinking and Web 2.0 in your presentation, I thought you’d completely lost it!  But as you gave examples, the light bulbs began to turn on – I think you are onto something!”  This was gratifying indeed – well worth the price of admission!

Graphic courtesy of RI Nexus

Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: General, IT Management, Next Generation Enterprise, Next Generation IT, Web 2.0, social networking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Design Thinking 2.0: Enabling Innovation with Web 2.0 – Part 3

Posted on March 25, 2010 by itorganization2017

In the first part of this series I examined the case for, and some of the key aspects of Design Thinking.   In Part 2 of this series, I distinguished between “Core” and “Edge” Capabilities and made the point that Design Thinking typically is heavy on Edge capabilities, whereas most businesses, and certainly, most corporate IT organizations are highly biased towards Core capabilities.  Now let’s drill into the Web 2.0 implications of Design Thinking.

The easiest way to do this for IT people is to think in terms of a process, the steps in that process, and how information technology might enable those steps.

Tim Brown‘s “Three Spaces of Innovation”

A good place to explore the Design Thinking process is in IDEO CEO, Tim Brown’s excellent HBR article from June 2008.  In that paper, Tim presents a model of how Design Thinking happens.  Tim’s model describes “Three Spaces of Innovation” – Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation.  What I like about this picture is that it’s not a simple linear process – it is somewhat chaotic, full of little feedback loops and more concerned with how things connect and flow that with a rigid process.

How Web 2.0 Might Enable Innovation Activities

In the figure below I have added simplistic examples of how different types of Web 2.0 capabilities might play into the major activities contained in Tim Brown’s model.  Consider this a simple illustration – there are a zillion possible variations on this theme!

Move Edge Activities to the Cloud

I believe that Cloud Computing in its various forms presents a relatively attractive way to quickly develop Edge capabilities.  Given that Design Thinking requires that we become more comfortable with experimentation, at the very least we should be experimenting with the Cloud, and Edge capabilities present an ideal case for cloud experiments.  We can keep them relatively isolated, implement them very quickly with little to no capital outlay, and everything we do in the cloud is inherently collaborative (e.g., think Google Docs, Google Wave, Mindmeister, etc.) just as just about everything we need to be doing around Design Thinking is inherently collaborative.

A More Traditional Process View

For those that prefer to take a more traditional process view, Wikipedia suggests a simple 7-Step Design Thinking process, rendered as a loop below.  Note, please don’t take this process too literally.  Design Thinking is more about ‘iterate and converge’ than the more typical IT process.  These steps are rarely going to be linear and sequential.

Collaborative Intents for Each Step

A couple of years ago, working on a multi-company research project with my colleague Tammy Erickson at nGenera, we identified 10 distinct types of ‘Collaborative Intents’ to be considered when planning any type of collaboration initiative.  For each collaborative intent, we can be quite explicit about the business outcomes to be achieved.  So, for example, in the Design Thinking step “Define” we are interested in ‘connecting ideas’ that might not typically be connected in order to amplify knowledge and identify innovation opportunities.

Web 2.0 Technologies for Each Step


We can map the types of Collaborative Intent to each step in the Design Thinking process.  In the table above, as an illustration, for each type of Collaborative Intent, I have identified the types of technology that might be useful to enable that intent, and provided some examples of actual technologies in each space.  Please note, mention or lack thereof for any specific technology does not imply any endorsement (or lack thereof!)

Does this make sense to you?  Do you have experience in applying Web 2.0 to Design Thinking?  Please weigh in – let’s generate some dialog on these ideas and their reality in practice.

Image courtesy of Red Jotter

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: General, IT Management, Next Generation Enterprise, Next Generation IT, Useful Tools, Web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Design Thinking 2.0: Enabling Innovation with Web 2.0 – Part 2

Posted on March 23, 2010 by itorganization2017

In my first post in this series, “Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution” I summarized the concepts of Design Thinking and raised the question of how Web 2.0 might enable increased innovation.  (For an interesting perspective on Design Thinking by Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum, see his excellent essay based on his 2007 speech to the Royal College of Art in London.)

In my next post I will  drill down and suggest ways to use Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to increase innovativeness and business success, but for now I want to examine the Core/Edge distinction in order to focus us clearly on Edge capabilities, where innovation tends to surface – without being encumbered by the Core.

“Core” and “Edge” Capabilities

Identifying the best ways to leverage collaborative technologies for innovation require an appreciation of the distinction between “Core” and “Edge” business capabilities.  The notions of “Core” and “Edge” I think were first articulated in June 2005 by John Hagel III, a former McKinsey consultant, and John Seely Brown, former chief scientist of Xerox in a Wharton Summary interview titled “Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge?“  In that interview, Hagel noted:

The… edge… has to do with the notion of competitive advantage, but it also has to do with the view that the ability to develop capabilities involves operating at the edge. Of course, “edge” has multiple meanings as well. It means the edge of the enterprise, the edge of business processes, geographic edges in terms of emerging economies, demographic edges in terms of younger generations coming in with different mindsets – it’s a whole set of edges that create the opportunity for accelerating capability building.”

Seely Brown noted in the same interview:

… being able to listen deeply and participate on the edge, you can pick up things before anybody else picks them up, and you can use that to accelerate your own capability building… This puts a new spin on why distributed collaboration around the world might be critical in creating this sustainable edge.”

My colleagues and I picked up this theme in our multi-company research at nGenera and I covered it in some depth starting in March 2008 with my “Surfing and IT Innovation” post, followed in July 2008 with my “Edginess and IT Innovation” post.

The reason this Core/Edge distinction is so important for IT professionals in the corporate environment is that the Core exerts enormous gravitational pull – innovation activities such as business experiments at the edge tend to get pulled into the core where standards and rigid processes rule.  The Core typically consumes 70% to 90% of IT resources, starving edge activities of the resources and focus they need to flourish.

Requirements of Core Capabilities

Core Capabilities exist to support exploitation of existing business opportunities.  As such they tend to be ‘locked down’, complex and hard to change – in fact, they are designed to prevent ‘bad change.’  Core processes are intended to be highly stable and predictable, typically built on proprietary and relatively fixed architectures.

Requirements of Edge Capabilities

By contrast, Edge Capabilities exist to stimulate and support the exploration of new business opportunities. As such they must be open, agile, transparent and adaptive.  While Core capabilities must ‘prevent bad change’, Edge capabilities are designed to stimulate ‘good change.’  They leverage open, emergent architecture and open sourcing. This, of course, is the realm of Web 2.0 – social media, open source, open innovation, cloud computing, etc.

Balancing Core and Edge Capabilities

The table below further highlights the differences between Core and Edge capabilities and shows example of each type.  My point here is that most IT organizations have many years of experience in perfecting Core capabilities but have relatively little experience with Edge capabilities.  The IT leaders’ natural preference is to control rather than facilitate, to direct rather than stimulate.


In Part 3 of this series, we will look at a generic Design Thinking process and see how each step can be enabled by Web 2.0 “Edge” capabilities.

Image courtesy of Larval Subjects

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: IT Management, Next Generation IT, social networking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Design Thinking 2.0: How Web 2.0 Might Foster and Enable an Innovation Revolution

Posted on March 9, 2010 by itorganization2017

About 3 years ago I first become aware of what can best be called a ‘movement’ dedicated to “Design Thinking,” when the term started showing up in some of my favorite blogs (e.g., Idris Mootee’s Innovation Playground).  The concepts became clearer and more compelling to me in June, 2008 when the Harvard Business Review published a wonderful piece on Design Thinking by Tim Brown, CEO and President of IDEO, the world-renowned innovation and design firm).  Since then, several books as well as some remarkable shifts in company fortunes have reinforced my interest, including Tim Brown’s ‘Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspired Innovation‘ and ‘The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage‘ by Roger L. Martin.

Most recently I’ve been giving a lot of thought to how Web 2.0 might help foster and enable Design Thinking.  I’ve been doing this as part of a new multi-company research project I am leading.  And I’m very excited!

The Case for Design Thinking in the U.S.

The insightful Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times Op-Ed column on March 2, 2010 titled, “A Word From the Wise” noted comments in a speech by Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel, who was in Washington to talk about competitiveness:

that a 2009 study done by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and cited recently in Democracy Journal “ranked the U.S. sixth among the top 40 industrialized nations in innovative competitiveness — not great, but not bad. Yet that same study also measured what they call ‘the rate of change in innovation capacity’ over the last decade — in effect, how much countries were doing to make themselves more innovative for the future. The study relied on 16 different metrics of human capital — I.T. infrastructure, economic performance and so on. On this scale, the U.S. ranked dead last out of the same 40 nations.”

Too many companies (and the governments that shape corporate behavior through taxes and regulations) have become too comfortable with exploitation, and not sufficiently adept at exploration.  They have come to rely too much on analytical thinking, and not enough on intuition.  They have become so bogged down in their business core, they have all but ignored the edge where customer problems meet the creative process to create new products and services.

In the next few posts, I want to share what I have discovered and learned so far, and hopefully stimulate some constructive discussion and engage you, my readers, in shaping the upcoming research.

Does Your Executive Management Know What They Are Doing?

In a 1998 HBR article entitled, “Interpretive Management: What General Managers Can Learn from Design,” Richard K. Lester, Michael J. Piore, Kamal M. Malek, observed:

Today’s markets are increasingly unstable and unpredictable. Managers can never know precisely what they’re trying to achieve or how best to achieve it. They can’t even define the problem, much less engineer a solution. For guidance, they can look to the managers of product design, a function that has always been fraught with uncertainty.”

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”  Marshall McLuhan

So, the big question for me is how can the tools we have shaped into Web 2.0 enable ‘Design Thinking’ to help us realize dramatically higher business performance?  It seems that we have a whole new and powerful set of capabilities – social networking, crowdsourcing, innovation jams, social and semantic search, collaborative project, program and portfolio management, polling, listening feeds and activity streams, tags, 2D and 3D modeling, prototyping, virtual worlds, workflow modeling and automation, and on and on. And yet, aside from knowing that a distant friend is having a bad hair day, most of these tools and technologies are still looking for a meaningful business purpose.

So, What Is “Design Thinking”?

There are many definitions and descriptions, but the ones I’ve found most illuminating are:

The methodology commonly referred to as design thinking is a proven and repeatable problem-solving protocol that any business or profession can employ to achieve extraordinary results.” – Mark Dziersk, Fast Compan

A discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” – Tim Brown, Ideo

Design thinking is always linked to an improved future.  It is a creative process based around the ‘building up’ of ideas, rather than critical thinking which is more concerned with analysis and the ‘breaking down’ of ideas.   Design Thinking moves design from a downstream (tactical) step to upstream (strategic) – vests everyone involved with the role of ‘designer.”  At its best, Design Thinking balances art and science, intuition and analytics, validity (doing the right things) and reliability (doing things right), exploration and exploitation

Design Thinking Has Profound Organizational Implications

Design Thinking has profound implications for:

  • Organization structures
  • Rewards, recognition, compensation
  • Portfolio management and strategic alignment
  • Governance and leadership style
  • Talent management and global sourcing

I believe that it also presents a significant opportunity …

  • For IT, HR, Finance, Facilities, Legal, etc. to step forward and make a real contribution to business success
  • To re-think ‘staff /line’ roles and responsibilities
  • To learn to love matrix management!

How is Design Thinking playing out in your organization?  How have Web 2.0 capabilities helped (or hurt) these efforts?  How do you see this playing out over the next couple of years?

To be clear, Design Thinking is essentially human centered, and there is something potentially incongruous in discussing the use of Web 2.0 to enable it.  However, I still firmly believe that these collective and collaborative technologies have a role in “greasing the skids” to make Design Thinking more accessible.  I will pick this up and drill down a bit further into this realm and discuss  ideas on how Web 2.0 can play a positive role in Design Thinking.

Graphic courtesy of IDEO

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: General, Next Generation Enterprise, Web 2.0, social networking | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments »

“Branding” Your IT Organization

Posted on February 22, 2010 by itorganization2017

I love this post on Attraction of Identity from my kindred spirit, Russ Aebig. (And not just because he references my work on Business-IT Maturity!)   Russ poses the question:

As an organization, who are you? What is your internal and external story?”

Russ goes on to say:

IT organizations typically are not oriented around branding and when pushed to think about it realize they have many disparate, confused, and mixed  identities, each shaped by recent events with their customers. From a brand perspective, there will be no clear message which the IT customers can positively associate with.”

The IT-Marketing Disconnect

Hallelujah!  And I’d go further to say that IT organizations typically have little to no sense of marketing, the core set of disciplines within which branding belongs. Many years ago, as an intern, I did a stint in both the sales and marketing organizations of a British computer manufacturer and quickly learned some of the key differences between these disciplines and how they play off against each other.  As a marketing executive defined it to me back then, “Marketing is about ensuring an environment in which your products (or services) sell!”  As such, marketing has much to do with understanding the market needs and dynamics, then shaping perceptions in that market so that your product’s (or service’s) ability to meet those needs is known and compelling.

Against that background, you can imagine the many shortcomings in how IT organizations:

  • Create deep understanding about their markets, segments, problems their customers want solved
  • Position their products and services in ways that can help solve those problems
  • Make it easy to find and engage in the IT organization’s available services
  • Price their services in ways that make sense to their customers and are “easy to do business with”
  • Communicate in powerful and positive ways to shape perceptions about how they are solving business problems and creating value

The Power of Branding

If IT organizations were automobiles, what make would your organization most closely equate to?  Would you be a Ferrari – extreme high performance, lots of pizazz, reserved for the enlightened few with the means to drive it?  Or perhaps a Mercedes – high quality, superbly engineered, high technology, style, and within reach of (some) mere mortals?  Or a Mazda – quality at an affordable price, with lots of innovation, to boot!  Or a Chevy truck – great value, solid dependable performance for going beyond the normal needs of a family saloon?

If you don’t like the automobile analogy (which I use somewhat tongue-in-cheek) pick something closer to home – perhaps a retail store chain, or consumer service provider, or a hotel chain.  Do you want to be known for breadth of service, with all the bells and whistles?  Or tightly focused on some core competencies?  Are you an innovator?  Or more about the nuts and bolts services needed in day to day operations?  This kind of branding analysis and execution may lead you to recognize that you have more than one brand to your IT organization (think FedEx Express, FedEx Ground and FedEx Office!)  With different types of services, different value propositions, and different ways of engaging.

The key, I believe, is to be thoughtful, as Russ suggests, about your value proposition(s) – how you want them to be seen and felt.  This is not only “good marketing” – it’s also a great way to build alignment among your leadership team as you work through the definition of your organization’s mission, vision, values and brand messages.

Image courtesy of Lauren Fernandez

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: IT Management, IT Maturity | Tagged: , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

Avatar – Blending “Hi Tech/Hi Touch”

Posted on February 18, 2010 by itorganization2017

Way back in 1982, futurist John Naisbitt authored the fascinating book Megatrends.  I especially recall my reaction to one of the trends – High tech, high touch – and the need to balance between technology and human interaction.  I recently caught a small segment on television about the making of Avatar.  (There’s lots of interesting clips of this stuff on YouTube.)  A couple of things really struck me.

Cameron Invented Some Cool New Tech!

The breadth and depth of new technologies invented (or, in come cases, refined) by James Cameron and his team is truly astounding.  Not just the “performance capture” technologies and related techniques, but also the technology to integrate the video streams from dozens (in some cases, hundreds) of video cameras and computer generated graphics in real time to a single ‘virtual camera‘ device that Cameron could look through as the filming was being done, and let him select the best angles and perspectives to capture the moment.  According to Wikipedia, the virtual camera system:

…displays an augmented reality on a monitor, placing the actor’s virtual counterparts into their digital surroundings in real time, allowing the director to adjust and direct scenes just as if shooting live action. According to Cameron, “It’s like a big, powerful game engine. If I want to fly through space, or change my perspective, I can. I can turn the whole scene into a living miniature and go through it on a 50 to 1 scale.”

Other technical innovations included a system for lighting very large areas, a massive motion-capture stage and the technology and methods for full performance capture, including facial expressions.  He also reduced the weight of notoriously heavy and unwieldy 3-D cameras to something that could just about be hand-held and up to the dynamics he envisioned for Avata.

But, Cameron Also Paid Attention t0 the Hi Touch!

But what most intrigued me, and took me back to Naisbitt and Megatrends, was the attention Cameron paid to the “hi touch” to make such a hi tech movie work.  This included taking the actors to rain forests in Hawaii to spend time getting the feel of such a landscape – and some of the most similar terrain he could find to his imaginary Pandora.  He wanted the actors to hike around the forest – to be able to recapture the feeling of a lush forest when they were on the concrete sound stage.  He wanted the actors to really look as though they were in control of the flying creatures, so he build a gimbal rig to let the actors get the feel of the movements (which had been previously worked out with wire frame models and their possible flight paths).

Hi Tech, Hi Touch

How are you balancing the high technology you are deploying with the high touch techniques that will help them integrate into the human world in which they must operate?

Image Courtesy of Collider.com

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Filed under: General | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

« Previous Page — Next Page »